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Division Spotlight
Human Factors, Instrumentation & Controls
Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
Meeting Spotlight
ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Latest News
Norway’s Halden reactor takes first step toward decommissioning
The government of Norway has granted the transfer of the Halden research reactor from the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) to the state agency Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning (NND). The 25-MWt Halden boiling water reactor operated from 1958 to 2018 and was used in the research of nuclear fuel, reactor internals, plant procedures and monitoring, and human factors.
R. Austin Freeman, Thomas Martin, Elwyn Roberts, Travis W. Knight (Univ of South Carolina)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 605-611
Uranium Silicide (U3Si2) is being evaluated as a fuel for use in light water reactors as its desirable thermophysical properties suggest an improvement over UO2 with respect to accident tolerance, However, much is still unknown about the in-reactor performance of U3Si2, making an accurate assessment of the fuel challenging. To better understand the behavior of U3Si2 across a wide range of possible environments, high temperature compressive creep testing has been performed on U3Si2 pellets. Using the combination of constant stress and constant temperature testing, a numerical model was developed that can predict both primary and secondary creep rates under a wide range of temperature and stress conditions. This model was implemented in BISON, a coupled multi-physics finite element nuclear fuel performance code, to simulate the performance of U3Si2 under a range of reactor conditions and analyze the effect of creep on fuel behavior from startup through pellet-clad mechanical interaction (PCMI). These models indicate that while thermal and irradiation volumetric effects are dominant during normal operation, under extreme stresses and temperatures creep can become a significant factor. Specifically, under PCMI creep was found to have a noticeable impact on the rate of stress change in the cladding and could extend the lifetime of the cladding by months.